If there’s one thing that unfies us all it’s hating guests in the booth during games and now they want to chatter ALL game?

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Honestly I'd love to watch a game with nothing but game sounds- the ball landing in the catcher's glove, the bat smacking the ball into play, the crowd cheering a spectacular play in the field. I'm fed up with all the talk in the booth, I don't care who it is.

The news Thursday that Fred Toucher and Rich Shertenlieb, hosts of 98.5 The Sports Hub’s morning drive program, had agreed to a multiyear contract extension might have come as somewhat of a surprise to listeners who had been tuning in recently.

After all, Toucher — the more acerbic of the duo — had occasionally offered vague suggestions in recent weeks that the show could be changing, or perhaps going elsewhere in a different format.

As it turns out, the hosts did do their due diligence regarding other opportunities. But in the end, according to Shertenlieb, there was really no consideration at all to leaving.

Before wondering how the hell could I stump someone into paying me probably in the 6 figures to sit on a radio station and say things that are wildly incorrect, knowing the entire base disagrees with you, just to get a reaction. When someone calls in to disagree, I signal to shut the call off before letting out a “WRONG” and continuing to hammer my point without anything to back it up.

Honestly I'd love to watch a game with nothing but game sounds- the ball landing in the catcher's glove, the bat smacking the ball into play, the crowd cheering a spectacular play in the field. I'm fed up with all the talk in the booth, I don't care who it is.

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a number of years ago the french CBC in Canada went on strike. The B's played the Habs in the playoffs and although they lost the couple games i watched with ZERO commentary were blissfull

Honestly I'd love to watch a game with nothing but game sounds- the ball landing in the catcher's glove, the bat smacking the ball into play, the crowd cheering a spectacular play in the field. I'm fed up with all the talk in the booth, I don't care who it is.

On his “Enough About Me” podcast episode that dropped on Dec. 7, Minihane revealed some of the conditions contained in the email, which included, he said, “not taking shots” at Red Sox owner John Henry and club president Sam Kennedy, “not make unfair or disparaging remarks about station partners’ interests, specifically we’re not going to make unwarranted or unsolicited attacks toward the Red Sox or the Globe.” There also was language, Minihane said, about “not going to gratuitously attack government officials when criticizing their decisions and actions. …”

And it goes on like that, including the catch-all that the hosts would work “collaboratively with station management around gray-area topics.”

Considering that Entercom didn’t simply fire Minihane and Callahan, it should be obvious that the company wanted to continue airing a wildly popular, profitable, albeit controversial, morning program.

Considering Minihane no longer is on the program, it should be obvious he didn’t buy into management’s edict to tone things down a little.

Minihane, in his interview with me, said, “They said, ‘We want you back but there are conditions.’ So now we’re in the weird world of, I was on medical leave and I’m coming back, but is it a different job? Is it the same job? What’s going on here? And the conditions were the greatest hits. The first line was, when Kirk comes back we want it to be more like the “Mut & Callahan” show … and less anger, less confrontation, don’t criticize the Globe, don’t take cheap shots at politicians, and everything was about me. And then our names are at the end, like we were gonna sign. And I thought, there’s no way, for my own mental health, I will not participate in this. I just can’t do it. And Gerry was like, ‘You gotta do it. They’ll forget about it after a while.’ I said, ‘They’re not, this is different. They are not gonna forget about it.’ So I just said I’m not gonna do it. And then we got to where I am now.

“I think they knew I was not going to sign that,” Minihane said.

Though it isn’t clear if there ever was an actual document to be signed — it was, after all, an email — it’s apparent that Callahan, a uniquely talented writer who worked for the Herald and Sports Illustrated before taking a full-time job with WEEI in 1997, agreed to the conditions.

“Gerry has survived in Boston, on Boston morning radio, for 20 years, which is unheard of,” Minihane said. “That’s like being in a real job for a hundred years. He wouldn’t be able to do that if he wasn’t smart and knew when to pick the fights and knew when he wasn’t going to win a fight. The difference between us, and people think I’m knocking him but I’m not, the difference between us is I would have gone to (Entercom CEO) David Field’s office in Philadelphia in the middle of all this and sat in there until he came out so I could tell him what a giant mistake he’s making and how it’s not productive at all and only would have hurt him.

It was bound to blow up. Everyone knew it. He started off good and ended almost unlistenable. I kept hoping they would bring back Dino. The show is so different compared to the old Dino and Callahan show.